Strangers in a New Land

by J.M. Adovasio, David Pedler

Where did Native Americans come from and when did they first arrive? This question continues to fascinate the archeological community.

For many years, the accepted version of American prehistory dated the arrival of peoples to the Western hemisphere between 12,900 and 13,200 years ago. This consensus, called the "Clovis Barrier," has recently been challenged by discoveries at numerous archeological sites in both North and South America. New genetic analysis has confirmed a Siberian origin for Native Americans and linguistic research suggests they arrived in three waves.

Due to these findings, most American archeologists are now convinced that people came to the Western Hemisphere thousands of years prior to Clovis--just how much earlier is the subject of continuing research, with evidence of human presence as early as 33,000 years ago. The history of the very earliest settlement of the New World is the subject of Strangers in a New Land.

This book documents 26 Clovis/Folsom Age Sites, Pseudo Pre-Clovis Sites, Legitimate Pre-Clovis Sites and Controversial Pre-Clovis Sites. An account of the history, discoveries and controversies surrounding each site is accompanied by photographs, maps and diagrams illustrating the excavations and dating the evidence of human activity. While these sites have been described in academic journals, Strangers in a New Land brings these findings together for the first time written in language accessible to the general reader.

Genres: Archaeology, Nonfiction, Anthropology, History, Prehistory, Science

336 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2015

Reviews

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the type of book I absolutely love. The early peopling of the Americas is a fascinating story and this is an update on the latest archealogic discoveries.

[Brian Engleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this summary of Clovis and pre-Clovis Paleo-Indian archaeological sites. Once one is able to get through the author's opinions in the opening (and, realistically, if he doesn't come out and tell us his opinions, then what would be the point in publishing?), there is a surprisingly great amount of data regarding pre-history in the Americas accompanied by high-quality, full-color photographs which are sometimes only loosely tied to the text which refers to them but which nonetheless provide an immersive experience into each site discussed. Before I forget to say so, Adovasio is imminently qualified to author such a tome and his credentials are beyond reproach. But for a few deficiencies I would consider this a preeminent work on Paleo-Indian studies.

When it comes to Adovasio's opinions and ideas, it's not that they are bad ones...they are generally accepted, grounded in facts and are clearly the result of a lifetime of painstaking study and research, as well as extensive discussion and argument with his peers. What makes it difficult to read, however, is his habit of presenting the opposing view so negatively that it reads a bit like mockery. This tendency to resort to reductio ad absurdum serves to undercut his intended effect. This has to do with his treatment of various theories, some of which are far-fetched but others still widely considered to hold merit. The way in which Adovasio boils down opposing ideas to ridiculous representations is a little bit insulting to the reader. Luckily, he is a little more civil when discussing individual sites and his colleagues.

The bulk of this book is a summary of a large sampling of important Paleo-Indian sites and the artifacts found therein. In each, he gives a very good description of the setting and surroundings in context with the period discussed. Adovasio does paint a good portrait of what the site may have been like at the time of habitation, though not in the way some laymen may prefer. He is, at heart, a scientist after all! So you will not get a cover to cover "history" of the early peopling of the Americas (which, I think, is impossible to do honestly with the scarcity of evidence currently on-hand), but you WILL get all of the pieces you might need to allow your own imagination to do some wandering on what things must have been like, how small groups of early Americans may have interacted and lived, how far they may have ventured and how extensive their trade networks may have been. For this alone, anyone who is a little well-versed on archaeology will enjoy this book a great deal.

One drawback to the way Adovasio chose to present his material is that he paints himself into a "comment on the oldest" artifacts position. A few sites which are described as "controversial" contain extensive, and reliable, collections of Clovis-era artifacts but are relegated to the "controversy" pile because their excavators have made claims to pre-Clovis occupations which seem unlikely. To his credit, the author does a good job of describing how geofacts (i.e. not man-made) are misidentified, and presents a good case for why that is so. But, for some of these sites, I really felt that I would have preferred he focus on the NON-controversial artifacts a bit more...I feel like I really missed out on some terrific and valuable information.

But that's kind of the final editorial, though Adovasio doesn't say so outright and I'm not sure whether he intended to hint at it. Money follows the sensational, and nobody can say that some Brazilian claiming he found 50,000 year old stone tools isn't sensational. So researchers, I think, are pressured to see what isn't there for the sake of securing funding for more research (I don't think that many of them are intentionally engaging in fraud, and Adovasio doesn't make that claim, either), which casts a shadow over what is verifiable and consistent. Consistency isn't sensational, so you don't see headlines about archaeologists finding another cache of predictable hardware in the proper time/place for human habitation. Instead, we hear far too often about how so-and-so has found 40 kya evidence for populations in the Americas (despite the lack of contemporary evidence in Siberia, where these populations supposedly migrated from). Would that researcher have published said "evidence" were he paid for scientific consensus rather than headline-making claims? I think probably not.

So, while I don't think it was the author's intention, I found myself gaining from this book the sense that archaeology is threatened by the very thing that drives it...philanthropy. Grants and donations follow the sensational, and so those who receive them set out to find the sensational, without which they are unlikely to receive more grants and donations. But I digress...

If you are interested in archaeology, if you are curious about the landscape and populations of this land upward of 14,000 years ago, if you are hoping to get a good overview of the research on these topics in one place, then you would do well to go ahead and read this book, study it, go back over it and find all that you missed, and then set out to find more information with a solid foundation of what science currently knows about the Paleo-Indians. Then, you need to get to work on correcting some Wikipedia pages, because this subject matter in popular/accessibly culture happens to get spun to the ridiculous levels indicated by Adovasio's Introduction. Which brings me back to my original thought...maybe his opinions and the way he presents the opposing views aren't quite so unnecessary as I initially thought. We, as a whole, are shockingly oblivious to the ground beneath our own feet, and I think we can stand to learn a thing or two about real archaeology, about how consensus is reached, and about why certain claims are relegated to a pile of "anomalies" and not immediately adopted into the synthesized picture of the peopling of North/South America. Far too often, you'll hear the insolent and ignorant speak of "conspiracies" against these data, which is not the case at all.

Well worth the 2 weeks I spent reading it, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is at all interested in the pre-history of the land we occupy. In the meantime, I hope Mr. Adovasio finds a better copy-editor (some of the grammar and sentence structure in the book was bad enough to serve as a distraction), and continues to publish insights and information on a subject which is perhaps not considered as much as it should be!

[Geoffrey Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully illustrated book that takes the reader to key archeological sites in the Americas in order to answer the challenging questions about where and when Homo sapiens arrived. The book festives two dozen sites, and takes the reader from the Yukon in northern Canada to southern Chile. The book explains in detail the terrain, the artifacts found, and the carbon dating process used to determine the approximate age of the discoveries. While the technical detail and the precise vocabulary used can challenge the general reader ( thank you for including a glossary of terms!), one gets a solid appreciation for the work done by archeologists over the years.
I had ordered this book after reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I was hoping to learn what conclusions we could draw about the migrations into the Americas, assuming that the Bering land bridge hypothesis was generally proven. Wrong. To my surprise, there is still far more we do not know, and recent discoveries have pushed back the arrival date by several thousand years. The Clovis culture consensus, which postulated an arrival roughly 11,000 to 12,000 years ago, has unravelled, as new sites have produced evidence for a human presence before that era. So we will have to wait as improved technologies and more digging will, we hope, provide answers about our first inhabitants.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the pictures that show size could really use a scale so the reader actually knows what the size of an object is. Text was dense with information yet concise, made it easy to read if I put the reading off until the last moment.

[Jennifer Bohnhoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Survey of all the Folsom, Clovis and Pre-Clovis sites in the Americas, I would have liked more details and a more generalized picture of life among these groups. Lots of pictures of the sites and recovered tools.

[Betsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, but extremely technical (for us).

[Dan Ust · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more a site by site discussion, so if you're looking for a long narrative or narrative account, you might look elsewhere.

That said, each site is gone over in detail with photos, maps, and diagrams. There's a useful glossary too.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great pictures and very detailed discussion of sites.

[Melissa Embry · Rating 5 out of 5]

How thrilled I was as a kid to get a National Geographic book in the 1960’s trumpeting the c. 13,000-year-old North American Clovis culture as the earliest evidence of humans in the new world. And what I pang I experienced at how dated that estimate of Native Americans’ arrival seemed when the time came to turn the beloved book over to my grandchildren. Then I found Strangers in a New Land, as gorgeous as any National Geographic coffee table-worthy volume, as beguiling, and far more up to date than my old favorite.

Archaeologist J.M. Adovasio, who has spent decades researching one of the best-dated pre-Clovis sites, and archaeological editor/illustrator David Pedler combine their skills in Strangers in a New Land to provide a layperson like me with an overview of the antiquity of Native Americans in both North and South America, as well as critiques of accepted, disputed, and decidedly controversial pre-Clovis sites – some of which would push the date of arrival in the Americas into the earliest migrations of modern humans.

While many questions about the origins of the first Americans – the exact site of their homeland in northeastern Asia, their original languages and migration routes – may never be resolved, it is becoming clearer that their original, often multiple journeys into the Americas, occurred thousands, even tens of thousands of years before the origin of the Clovis culture would indicate.

The Meadowcroft Rock Shelter site in Pennsylvania, where author Adovasio has worked, is conservatively estimated to have been occupied 2,000 years before the appearance of the first distinctive Clovis artefacts. The Cactus Hill site in Virginia may date to more than 20,000 years before the present, and successive occupations at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile may date to more than 30,000 years before the present.

Such early dates, including some of the eastern coast of South America, Adovasio argues, increase the likelihood that early Americans arrived, probably in successive waves, in boats working their way along the continental coastlines as well as overland via the much-touted Bering land bridge between Asia and North America.

None of these earlier dates detract from the important of the Clovis-Folsom cultures discoveries. Until African-American cowboy George McJunkin discovered strange bones eroding out of a dry wash near Folsom, New Mexico, in the early 20th century (bones later recognized to be from archaic bison associated with Ice Age era stone tools), scientists generally held that humans could not have arrived in America until after the last Ice Age. (McJunkin did not live to see the vindication of his discovery, or that shortly afterward of similar stone tools in nearby Clovis, New Mexico.)

More decades would pass before the Clovis First theory of American settlement would be overturned by definitively pre-Clovis cultures thousands of miles to the east and south. The authors of Strangers in a New Land list brief accounts of 24 Clovis and pre-Clovis sites, including sites who pre-Clovis origins – sometimes of far greater antiquity – are disputed, or at least controversial, including sites in Mexico and South America that may be less familiar to North American readers.

Each account includes a map and photographs of the site, its discovery and significance, and plentiful photographs of artefacts. Also included are a glossary and discussion of radiocarbon dating, especially helpful for this nonspecialist reader, notes and a bibliography that invites further investigation.